Feeling All Right: The Emo Conservative Commentariat

This week, I've been reading George W. Bush's book. (We all have.) It brings up lots of points of (to me) contention — over the handling of Iraq and Afghanistan and torture, to name the big three — but I want to focus on two things here. One is something that many others have also commented on: the man's basic decency. It's something that those who knew and worked with him brought up again and again, especially in the face of the brutal character-assassination campaign that dogged him for the latter half of his presidency. Unless the man is a spectacular liar and hypocrite, I'm inclined to believe that those who knew him were being honest on this point, however dishonest they were on matters of policy. His book makes that clear. George W. Bush is simply not a mean or devious character. He is not a Nixon. He has not and is not waging some shameless post-presidency battle to clear his name and canonize himself, as Nixon did. He does not blame others for his errors; he admits and accepts responsibility for them. On contentious decisions in which he believes he was right, he does not accuse his detractors of being fools and schemers; he defends what he did. However much anyone may think he failed — and let me be clear, I think he failed horribly on many things — an elemental Nixonian falsity wasn't the cause.

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The second point is that, in the public/pundit battle to define Bush's legacy, it's largely been forgotten that quite a lot of what Bush did as president was not terribly controversial, was in fact quite widely praised by people from both sides of the aisle, particularly during his first three or four years. No Child Left Behind, for example, though now open to wide (and, ironically enough, bipartisan) criticism, was a collaborative effort between the Bush administration and Ted Kennedy. Bush also fought for, won, and stayed on top of on an ambitious, effective, and totally altruistic program that provides cheap anti-retroviral drugs to eleven developing nations that suffer HIV/AIDS epidemics. Beyond that, I, for one, remember being quite taken with the idea of "compassionate conservatism" that Bush ran on in 2000. I believed he meant what he was talking about — in part because I had seen his little brother Jeb practicing compassionate conservatism in Florida, where I grew up (as well as traditional fiscal conservatism — something I wish his big brother had emulated). Yes, comp-con disappeared after 9/11. Yes, the hiring of ideological neo-conservatives like Cheney and Rumsfeld and the devolution of policy decisions to them doomed it. But it was real as long as it lasted, and you know what? It was pretty attractive to a lot of people.

I bring this up to illustrate a point about presidential opinion-making today. Simply put, even on the supposedly intelligent and independent-minded pages of the right-wing side of the opinion industry, President Obama can almost literally do nothing right. That is, nothing correct. Before anyone protests that that was true of the left-wing pages regarding Bush during his tenure, let me re-emphasize: I am talking about intelligent and independent-minded commentary. The DailyKoses and WorldNetDailys of the world I exclude. These are political action committees in all but tax status. They are not, in the sense that I mean, thoughtful.

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With that in mind, to review the archived pages of prominent left-wing representatives of thoughtful commentary — Matthew Yglesias and Jonathan Chait, to name two majors — is to see not infrequent examples of praise for specific actions by Bush and his contemporary conservatives. It is also to see constant thoughtful analysis, regardless of the final judgment.

But to review the equivalent contemporary pages of the right — National Review Onlineand Charles Krauthammer, to name two majors — is to see nearly universal condemnation of everything Obama does and says, and to see ad nauseum invocations of vague ideology (individual freedom, small government, all that hollow sloganeering) rather than factual analysis. (Kevin, Reihan, John, I'm not including you here. Please, write more.)

Two NRO posts from earlier today illustrate what I'm talking about.

Kathryn Jean Lopez, in the latestof her treacly "thanks for funding us" missives, quotes a donor from Nashville on his reasons for giving:

I own a small restaurant in Nashville. We were destroyed in the May flood that was ignored by our government. We didn't receive one cent from the government, and that's just the way we like it.

This is totally inspirational and small-government and conservative. No matter that it's also utter bull. It fits the narrative — and believe me, "Obama ignored Nashville (because it's white)" is a real narrative on the right — and it brings in the cabbage.

And Robert Costa takes pains to point out that Obama mistook a Chinese reporter for a Korean one. Read the exchange here. Seriously, read it. It's short, and the rest of this won't make sense unless you do. Done? Then ask yourself what the point was. Costa doesn't say. But he is confident that his post will make his readers think the president is dumb and possibly racist. Imagine! An American president requesting questions from Korean reporters doesn't instantly recognize that the reporter he called on is Chinese. The idiot! The bigot! Why, this is like that time an American president called a vital wartime ally a nation of Pakis! (And, lest you be fooled, the current American president's quite graceful handling of a slightly and innocently embarrassing situation was just more of his slick Chicago jive.)

At least, that's what I think Costa wants you to think. Because, again, he doesn't say.

Which brings up a final but, I think, most vital point. What Lopez did and was Costa did is simply post without comment statements about events that are, in the first case, untrue and in the second, unremarkable, and expect their readers to read the Deeper Meanings. It's typical of NRO commentators (sorry, I guess that should be "commentators"). And they are probably rightly confident that those Deeper Meanings are clear to many of their readers.

The fact is that we are now in a period in which the right is employing the Big Lie, and employing it effectively (see Andrew Sullivan's iron argument here), about its president. It's not surprising. But what's sickening is that it's being employed not just by the ideological right, but by the supposedly thoughtful right. So, a request: when reading NRO and Krauthammer and the rest, remember that one of the individual rights they're always squealing are endangered by Obama is the right to think for yourself. They're not going to do it for you. In fact, they fear free conservative thought, and desire instead a uniform conservative emotion. Which is why they try to "think" for you with these naked emotional non-comments, though they don't have the guts to say that's what they're doing. And it's also why they "think" for the conservative cause, but don't actually think, as true conservatives do, for themselves.

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